Staten Island congressional candidates Michael Grimm and Michael Allegretti have gone to war over claims that Grimm is wearing two ribbons in a photo he circulated in his Marine Corps dress uniform that Allegretti says he did not earn.

Previous Formative Experiences: Schneiderman’s “Law Enforcement” Role As Deputy Sheriff Was Teaching, Grant Writing And Administration In Prosecution Of Early Financial Fraud Case As ADA, Dinallo Discovered The Martin Act Scattered Complaints Of Violations, Misconduct And Coercion In Rice’s Early Prosecution Record S. 3000, Ed Muskie, And Richard Brodsky In-Between Formative Experiences Sean Coffey, Assistant U.S. Attorney The first trial did not go well. A man had been arrested with an 8-ball of cocaine at a post office, and the agents thought they might have stumbled onto a drug ring of mailmen dealing on the job. The case was assigned to Sean Coffey—young and eager and new in the U.S. Attorney’s office, confident he could get the conviction. Coffey finished his opening statement. The judge turned to Ellen Yaroshefsky, a Cardozo law professor who had taken up the defendant’s cause. She passed. Over the next few days, Coffey laid out his case. Then Yaroshefsky finally stood up: the only thing that mattered, she told the jury, was that the man had been entrapped. They could not convict him of possession—the whole thing had been a set-up. After two days of deliberations, the verdict came back: one count, not guilty; one count, 11-1 hung jury. “It was a question of experience, and he didn’t have it, but he was just lovely about it,” said Yaroshefsky, who described Coffey as “conscientious, thoughtful, honorable—he was exactly what a prosecutor ought to be.” But still: it was his first trial as an assistant United States attorney, and he had flubbed it. So Coffey was a little surprised when James Comey—later the Southern District U.S. Attorney himself, and after that, the deputy attorney general who became famous for stopping Alberto Gonzalez from getting John Ashcroft to sign off on continuing the domestic surveillance program from his hospital bed—popped his head in to say congratulations. “‘This means you’ll never be a member of the chicken shit club,’” Coffey remembers Comey telling him, “‘those wimpy prosecutors who are so concerned about their perfect record that they never try a hard case.’” Coffey talks about his early experiences working as a carpenter’s apprentice, building skyboxes at Madison Square Garden and swaying in the wind as he hung sheetrock on the 102nd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center as important eye-openers to the experiences of other people, particularly his fellow workers, when in high school. And he often references his time in the Navy, though in front of New York Democrats, he usually leaves the part that had him serving as a military assistant to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. There was also a stop at Paul Weiss right after passing the bar. But the real shaping of his legal career, he said, was when he started with U.S. Attorney, Southern District. Coffey had been looking forward to joining the office since his days as a night student at Georgetown Law (while his day job was at the Pentagon and the White House). The secret service agents he got to know among his classmates used to go on about the office’s reputation, he said, and that was where he decided he wanted to be. Coffey got a conviction on his second trial, for a post office robbery in the Bronx, going on to bring 13 cases to verdict over his four years at St. Andrew’s Place. He was purposefully building a reputation, he said, and one that became part of a larger legal strategy for the rest of his career. “I developed a very firm belief that if people believed that you will take cases to trial, you will get better pleas,” Coffey said. Working in the Narcotics Division, Coffey got convictions of several cocaine dealers despite a criminal informant who turned out to be a recovering heroin addict who unwittingly wore a wire with a transmission problem. Purposefully, Coffey made sure he never knew the tapes were blank until the defense was cross-examining him, building up his credibility as a witness with the jury. He helped bring down the 48 Hours heroin ring in a multiple-wiretap, two-year process that netted 50 arrests (including the Columbia supplier), managing the DEA agents and pulling together the tapes and the information to build the case, said Tom Finnegan, then also an AUSA working with him on the case. “At first, at the takedown, I thought we had a really weak case against the guy, but it turned out, with Sean’s work, we were able to build the case up really well,” Finnegan said. At the end of his time in the office—he was already with Bernstein Litowitz by the time the trial started—Coffey was assigned a case of three North Carolina men arrested by the NYPD for gun trafficking. Thanks to an offhand comment from one of them in an interview, Coffey was able to build an investigation that demonstrated that the guns were being traded for a heap of crack that one of the men had shoved down his pants and later dumped down the toilet in the station, beyond the notice of the police. Without even a gram of crack as evidence or any of the arresting officers realizing they had been involved in a drug bust, Coffey got a three-way drug conviction. “It was novel in the sense of: it’s pretty hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there were drugs when there were no drugs found,” said Ira Feinberg, who handled the appeal for the U.S. Attorney’s office—which challenged other aspects of the case, but not Coffey’s proof of the drugs. “It was a unique situation, one that I had not had before,” said Robert Koppleman, one of the defense attorneys on the case, who remembers Coffey as “a good lawyer. I thought he was a straight kind of guy—not like everyone there at that time.” Coffey was in the office from October 1991 through April 1995, and would have been there longer, if not for the financial pinch that came once he and his wife started having children, after years of trying. “It turned out the solution was to go on a government salary,” he said. “I had just been at the office, and I got my first paycheck, and I called Anne, and I said, ‘Honey I’ve got news for you: the paycheck here is $100 less than half of my last Paul Weiss check.’ And she said, ‘I’ve got news for you: it’s going to have to feed three people.’” But the experiences stuck with him, pushing him to reexamine evidence others might have missed and learning how to build business investigations while in the office’s Major Crimes unit, which he says were critical for when he launched his cases against companies like WorldCom in private practice years later. So was that early lesson of pursuing trials and building a reputation for being the kind of lawyer to who did. Expect more of that mentality and delegating downward to top recruits if he is elected attorney general, Coffey said. “I’m going to try and take more cases to trial,” Coffey said, “and hopefully these young kids coming out of Paul Weiss, Skadden, who want to try cases in the public sector will be throwing résumés to the OAG’s office, in addition to the Manhattan DA’s office and the U.S. Attorney’s office.” eidovere@cityhallnews.com Read other formative experiences: Schneiderman’s “Law Enforcement” Role As Deputy Sheriff Was Teaching, Grant Writing And Administration In Prosecution Of Early Financial Fraud Case As ADA, Dinallo Discovered The Martin Act Scattered Complaints Of Violations, Misconduct And Coercion In Rice’s Early Prosecution Record S. 3000, Ed Muskie, And Richard Brodsky In-Between

After six months of deadlock following the resignation of Marcus Cederqvist, the surprise candidacy of former State Sen. Serf Maltese quickly crystallized the selection process of George Gonzalez as the new executive director of the City Board of Elections. Though new in the top job, Gonzalez has been with the agency since the early 1980s, and says he has become very familiar with its ins and outs, as well as the criticisms that are often leveled at its operations.

By the time Charlie Goodell introduced his article in the Congressional Record, Richard Brodsky was back in Cambridge, halfway through his third year at Harvard Law. He had only recently returned. On May 4, 1970-—which happened to be his 24th birthday-—four students were shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State in the turmoil following Nixon’s launch of the Cambodia Campaign. Harvard, like many campuses, immediately shut down.

Within Kathleen Rice's early record as a prosecutor, there were three cases where defense attorneys and judges cited issues with Fourth Amendment rights, due process and prosecutorial conduct. Problems introducing evidence in 1995 led a judge to give a retrial to a man Rice prosecuted for child sodomy. Claims of witness coercion from a cocaine addict, who switched his testimony on the stand about the man he identified in a line-up for Rice in 1999, led to an almost immediate not-guilty verdict. And in 2002, while an assistant U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia, Rice’s trouble introducing evidence in a gun trial led to the release of a man who was later arrested again for a crime he committed when he would have otherwise been behind bars. Two of the cases were appealed. One led to a lawsuit settled by the city in which Rice, as the ADA who handled the initial investigation, was named as a defendant.

Today, financial fraud cases are standard issue for every office with jurisdiction in New York. But then, the A.R. Baron case was something new: the defendants felt they were being made examples of, and the prosecution was faced with making the jury, as well as the public at large, understand a different kind of crime.

Schneiderman still has his deputy sheriff badge, shiny as ever, and complete with the six points and a pin on the back to attach to his shirt. But though many might understand that badge and title to represent a position of some significance in traditional police-style work, such as arresting criminals and patrolling streets, it was not. Schneiderman defines his experience in Pittsfield, Massachusetts for two years after graduating from Amherst as law enforcement. But interviews and records from those days demonstrate that this is an expansive use of the term, though one that his campaign says is consistent with the criminal justice philosophy has he has been preaching during campaign for attorney general.

The Senate Democrats picked Pedro Espada as their majority leader, but they are not spending any money to keep him in his seat.

Rick Lazio is hoping to lead the Republican ticket, but his campaign spokesman would not say whether he was comfortable heading a slate that includes attorney general candidate Dan Donovan, following comments that appeared to dismiss Lazio’s repeated calls for Andrew Cuomo to launch an investigation into the funding of the Park51 mosque.

This weekend’s New York Times endorsement in the attorney general’s race was an “earthquake” that “effectively transformed a slow 5-person marathon into a two-person sprint between Eric Schneiderman and Kathleen Rice over the next three weeks,” according to an internal memo from Schneiderman’s campaign manager Emily Arsenault to the members of his finance committee, obtained by City Hall.